Top Gunned

It was Jason Tugman's first day of work. Almost a decade later, he still remembers the screams.

A former circus fire-eater, he'd taken a job as a lighting technician for The Oprah Winfrey Show after burning off a chunk of his tongue. The pay was $32 an hour and he didn't want to screw it up. But as Tugman carefully hung black curtains in Studio B, directly behind the orange set where Oprah taped, those screams wouldn't stop. The crowd sounded as if it might tear the building down.

"I could just hear the audience going absolutely apeshit," Tugman says. "Just the absolute losing of minds." He glanced at a monitor that transmitted a silent live feed. Tom Cruise was on a couch.

You can probably picture it in your head: Cruise, dressed in head-to-toe black, looming over a cowering Oprah as he jumps like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Cruise bouncing on that couch is one of the touchstones of the last decade, the punch line every time someone writes about his career.